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Flynn, M.S. 2003. Key Lessons from Recent Entrants into the U.S. Automotive Industry.
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In the 1980s, four Japanese automotive manufacturers established transplant production facilities in the United States. Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Toyota all came here for shared reasons as well as reasons specific to each company's strategies and constraints. They found an industry profoundly different from what they had experienced in Japan, but in many ways one much better than they expected it to be. Nevertheless they faced enormous challenges and decisions. What is perhaps most surprising about their experiences is the extent to which quite varied approaches yielded similar results. Of course, the results were not identical, and some of that variation in outcomes was undoubtedly tied to the different approaches they adopted. A fundamental question about the experiences of these transplants is what lessons they learned about how to establish an assembly operation in the United States. This article discusses their experience in transplants.